Somewhere in your office is a computer everyone quietly avoids. It takes four minutes to boot, the fan runs like weather, and the person stuck with it has learned to fetch coffee while Outlook opens. You know that one needs replacing. What's harder to know is whether the rest of the fleet is one year behind it or four — and nobody wants to be the person asking for twelve new laptops in a single budget.
The standard answer is every three to five years. It's a reasonable answer. But it's worth knowing where the number comes from, because it was never really about the computer.
Where the three-to-five-year rule comes from
Three forces converge around that age, and none of them is the processor wearing out.
- Warranty. Business-class machines are typically sold with three years of cover. The day it lapses, every repair comes out of your pocket — if the part is even still made.
- The physical parts. Laptop batteries fade noticeably by year three or four. Fans fill with dust, hinges loosen, thermal paste dries out, and the machine runs hotter and slower to protect itself. Desktops age more gracefully — no battery, better airflow — and often stretch to the far end of the range.
- Operating-system cliffs. A machine can be working perfectly and still fall off the support list. Windows 10 support ended in October 2025, and plenty of machines that ran it happily didn't meet the hardware bar for Windows 11. If any of those are still in service, that's a problem to solve now, not at the next refresh.
There's a duller force too: many accountants write hardware off over a similar period, so the books and the machines tend to expire together — though the depreciation schedule has no idea how the laptop is doing.
The signals that matter more than the calendar
Replace on evidence, not anniversaries. These are the signs a machine is costing more than it's worth:
- It's on its second out-of-warranty repair. One repair is bad luck. Two is a pattern, and the third will arrive at the worst possible moment.
- It's bleeding payroll minutes. A machine that wastes ten minutes of someone's day — booting, freezing, waiting on a spinner — costs close to a working week of paid time a year. Ten minutes a day is nearly an hour a week; multiply that by the hourly cost of the person in front of it, and the savings of keeping it evaporate.
- It no longer gets security updates. When the operating system or the firmware stops receiving patches, this stops being a preference question. An unpatched machine on a business network is a liability with a keyboard.
- It can't run what the business runs. If the accounting package, the design suite or plain video calls stutter on it, the machine has retired itself. You're just late signing the paperwork.
One caution: slowness has many causes, and several are free to fix. Run through the slow-computer checklist first — you may be one startup-program purge away from a reprieve.
Staggered refresh or big bang
There are two ways to fund a fleet; both work if you follow them.
Staggered means replacing a quarter or a third of the machines every year. The budget line stays flat, somebody always has current hardware, and you never face the quarter where everything dies at once — machines bought together age together. The cost is a mixed fleet: more models, more chargers, more remembering which docking station goes with which laptop.
Big bang means replacing everything at once. One disruption instead of an annual one, a uniform fleet that's easy to support, and better pricing when you buy a dozen identical machines. The catch is the budget spike — and the same cliff coming back in four years, all at once, whether that year is convenient or not.
For a fleet under about ten machines, big bang is usually simpler. Beyond that, stagger. Either way, standardise on one or two models, keep a configured spare on a shelf, and treat moving a person onto a new machine as a planned job, not a Friday-afternoon favour.
Buy or lease, briefly
Leasing — often dressed up as "device as a service" — gives you a predictable monthly cost with the refresh built in: machines get swapped on schedule whether you remembered to budget or not. Over the term you pay more than buying outright, the machines are never yours, and the return conditions are where the fine print lives. Buying is cheaper across the machine's life and the asset is yours, but the refresh discipline is entirely on you. If cash flow is tight and discipline is loose, leasing buys you a system. If you have both, buy.
The trickle-down mistake
It feels thrifty: the senior person gets the new laptop, their old one moves down a desk, and the oldest machine in the building limps to whoever joined last week. It's the opposite of thrifty. The newest hire is the person you most need productive, and the person least able to tell a failing machine from "that's just how things run here" — so faults get discovered late. The message it sends on day one is unhelpfully clear, too.
Better: new machines go to new hires and heavy users. The oldest machine doesn't get recirculated. It gets retired.
The honest life-extender: an SSD and more memory
If a machine is slow but structurally sound, one upgrade genuinely changes its life: swap the spinning hard drive for an SSD and add memory. On an older machine, that's the difference between a four-minute boot and a thirty-second one, for a fraction of the price of a replacement — the rare upgrade you feel every single day.
It only makes sense when three things are true: the machine still receives security updates, the battery and hinges have life left, and the processor isn't the bottleneck. Don't spend money extending a machine that has already fallen off the support list — check whether it can move to Windows 11 before you order parts. An SSD in an unsupported machine is a nicer deckchair.
Disposal is a data job first
An office computer's drive holds payroll runs, client files, saved browser passwords and years of email. Deleting the files does not remove them, and neither does a quick format — recovery software reads straight past both. Before any machine leaves your control:
- Get the data off. Confirm anything worth keeping is backed up somewhere you've actually tested.
- Wipe the drive properly. That means a full-disk-encryption reset or a certified wiping tool, not a drag to the recycle bin. For drives that held sensitive client data, physical destruction with a certificate is the clean answer.
- Recycle through a certified e-waste recycler. Many will issue a certificate of data destruction — keep it. If a client ever asks how you handle their information, that piece of paper beats any policy document.
What you should not do is let retired machines pile up in a storeroom. The museum of old Dells nobody will sign off on discarding is a room full of unwiped drives.
Fleet planning, handed off
Tracking warranty dates, staggering a refresh, migrating each person and wiping what leaves is exactly the unglamorous work Koadi's managed IT covers — here's what managed IT costs and how the pricing works. For a one-off job — a batch of machines to assess, a fleet's worth of migrations, a pile of old drives to wipe — post it free, set a fixed price or take bids from vetted technicians, and the money sits in escrow until you approve the work. Remote help covers every US state; when hands are needed, local vetted techs come to you.